Description
This is a classic book in the literature on child and youth care and has been widely translated and has inspired many subsequent books based on the power of relationships in building resilience and healing. This continues to be a viable resource for those who work directly with challenging children and youth. The authors chose the title as a counterpoint to Robert Lindner’s psychotherapy book, The Fifty Minute Hour. While recognizing the importance of individual counseling, the most powerful change comes from daily therapeutic relationships with child and youth care workers, teachers, foster parents, and mentors. The authors anchor this book in their extensive direct work with children experiencing conflict and draw from professional expertise in psychology, education, and social work. Recent research on trauma shows that, while therapy is valuable, lasting resilience and healing usually occurs in the natural relationships in the child’s life space of the other 23 hours.
Routledge (1969). 256 pages.
Reviews
“The Other 23 Hours is a book that badly needed to be written. And read. More urgently it needs to be applied…especially for thousands of Nobody’s Children.”
—David Wineman, co-author of The Aggressive Child
“One of the key texts on a life space approach is The Other 23 Hours. This title encapsulates the idea that what happens in the other 23 hours, those hours when worker and client are not involved in treatment or therapy is just as important as more formal ‘professional’ interventions. The life-space is a mini society in which people learn to interact, build relationships and feel included.”
—Mark Smith, University of Edinburgh
“Sometimes those specialist interventions—a session with a psychologist or psychiatrist—are seen as the answer to all the child’s problems. The seminal work, The Other 23 Hours is all about establishing staff teams that are well managed and knowing what they are about outside of the one hour during which children see the specialist or expert.”
—Noel Howard, Irish Journal of Applied Social Studies
